Hello world, its Tuesday, November 10th, 2026
Nvidia’s week got worse, with reports that its top lawyer contacted the officials investigating Megaspeed and a shareholder suit filed five minutes after Monday’s close. Google picked the same day to launch two more TPUs, one of them running on AMD host CPUs. TSMC posted another record month, Infineon expects its data center power sales to nearly double, and Rapidus is reportedly behind on 2nm.
Let’s get into it. --Austin & Vik
Latest episode: Intel’s Earnings Disaster: Bad Luck, Bad Planning, or Both? — listen on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Full transcript: daily.semidoped.com.
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Nvidia’s lawyer contacted the Megaspeed investigators
Bloomberg and the New York Times reported Monday that Nvidia general counsel Tim Teter called Commerce Under Secretary Jeffrey Kessler in late summer 2025 to ask about the Megaspeed smuggling probe. According to the reports, Teter then emailed Bureau of Industry and Security investigators directly, saying Kessler had given him permission. One of them turned down his request for a meeting. Kessler told staff to handle the case by the book. The Justice Department later asked Commerce to pause its work, and the case is now a criminal investigation at DOJ.
Nvidia said Teter did not know about Jensen Huang’s affair when he made the call, and that it regularly consults officials on export questions. Bloomberg also reports that trade records show Nvidia’s count of chips sold to Megaspeed through hardware partners came up about 50,000 units short. Nvidia says it later inspected more warehouses holding the missing hardware. Megaspeed is still listed as an Nvidia Cloud Partner.
The story has moved from a CEO’s private life to whether Nvidia leaned on the export-control system, and that is the version Congress cares about. House Democratic leaders are asking for answers and tighter China chip rules. A proposed shareholder class action was filed in San Jose five minutes after Monday’s close, when Nvidia had fallen 4.3%, cutting its market value by about $190 billion.
Source: Bloomberg · NBC News · Reuters (lawsuit)
Google adds two TPUs, and AMD gets the host socket
Google added TPU 8tx and TPU 8i Max to its eighth-generation lineup, making four new TPU systems this year. TPU 8tx uses the same silicon as TPU 8t, adds hardware confidential computing for regulated customers, and runs on 5th Gen AMD EPYC host CPUs. TPU 8i Max puts two TPU 8i chips in one package, which doubles compute, SRAM and HBM bandwidth in the same rack footprint. Google didn’t give pricing or availability dates.
Google is now splitting one TPU generation into four systems, each tuned for a different job, from training to secure inference to long-context agents. The two-chip 8i Max is also a packaging and HBM story: more silicon and more memory bandwidth per rack without a new die.
AMD says EPYC is now the host CPU at more than 10 hyperscalers and frontier labs, across GPU and custom-ASIC systems. AMD shares rose 13% on Monday.
Source: Google · AMD · ServeTheHome
Vik: Two training chips, and two inference chips all from the 8th generation TPU. It tells you how much workloads vary, and why specialized silicon variants are required to extract the best possible performance.
Austin: Vik, maybe we should discuss this on the pod, I think it got overlooked given all the other news going on this week.
TSMC posts another record month
TSMC’s October revenue came in at NT$586.89 billion, up 59.7% from a year ago and 14.7% from September. That beat August’s record of NT$514.81 billion. Revenue for the first ten months is up 43.3%, close to the company’s guidance of about 44% growth for the full year.
One month in, TSMC is already running above the monthly pace it needs to hit the top of its fourth-quarter guidance. TSMC guided to about NT$1.66 trillion to NT$1.73 trillion for the quarter, which works out to roughly NT$575.6 billion a month at the high end.
The broader Taiwan numbers match. Taiwan’s chip exports rose 63% in October to $31.17 billion, and total exports hit a record $96.76 billion.
Source: TSMC · Taiwan News · Taiwan Ministry of Finance
Vik: With Intel’s ongoing struggles, the world has no alternative to TSMC. Demand for chips is still high and TSMC remains key supplier.
Austin: Up 15% month over month!!!
Infineon expects data center power sales to nearly double
Infineon guided fiscal 2027 revenue to about €20 billion, up more than 20% from €16.35 billion in fiscal 2026. It expects data center power supply revenue of close to €4 billion, up from €2.2 billion, which includes about €500 million from conventional data centers. AI power revenue alone was €1.7 billion last year, more than double the year before, and Infineon says it still couldn’t meet all customer requests.
Infineon says customers have signed or are negotiating multi-year supply deals and capacity reservations worth more than €10 billion. Power chips for AI racks now look like a capacity-reservation business too.
Not everything beat. Free cash flow guidance of about €1.8 billion came in well below the €2.26 billion analysts expected, because Infineon plans to spend €3.0 billion to €3.5 billion on fabs in Dresden, Kulim and Villach. The shares still rose about 9% in early trading.
Source: Infineon · Reuters · Investing.com
Vik: Power semis is very important, and I have been saying that it is inevitable that it will become the next most dominant factor in the AI buildout. I have several articles on my substack on why: Datacenter constraints and AI power, Power as next physics wall, 800V DC sidecar, DC power architectures.
Rapidus is reportedly behind on 2nm
Bloomberg reports that Rapidus has not yet shown working SRAM cells, a milestone it was supposed to hit by this summer, which puts it at least several months behind schedule. The report also says the company is dealing with dust and particle contamination in its Hokkaido cleanroom. Rapidus says it is still fully committed to starting mass production in the second half of fiscal 2027, which ends in March 2028.
SRAM is a basic building block of nearly every leading-edge chip, so missing it now leaves Rapidus little room to make up time before its 2028 target. Japan has committed more than ¥2 trillion to Rapidus, and a long delay could put that support and its planned IPO at risk. Customers were already cautious about leaving TSMC.
Source: Bloomberg via Japan Times · TrendForce
Vik: Let’s see that 6T SRAM cell working and the resulting density. Very important first step for technology.
Austin: I’ve been skeptical anyone could take 2nm technology and ramp it to production scale, from scratch. Seems it is, in fact, quite hard.
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Industry Chatter
These are just unconfirmed industry whispers.
Nvidia orders — Taiwan supply chain sources told Commercial Times that Nvidia may slow chip orders at TSMC and ASE because of the Huang controversy, which would free up capacity for AMD and ASIC designers like Broadcom, MediaTek and Alchip. Server chassis, rack and cooling suppliers say their orders and shipments haven’t changed (TrendForce).
Anthropic IPO — Anthropic sent banks a filing showing a $69.3 billion IPO at $70 to $80 a share, plus a $26 billion private placement from Google, Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, Micron, Microsoft and TSMC, then told them the pricing details were inaccurate and an updated filing would follow (Reuters).
Moonshot B300s — Documents seen by Bloomberg show Moonshot AI renting 32 Super Micro servers with Nvidia B300 GPUs inside China in August, valued at 432 million yuan. Moonshot disputes the documents (Bloomberg via Investing.com).
Samsung 3D Cube-H — Samsung aims to finish its hybrid-bonded logic stacking technology, with about a 6µm pitch, and its first design kit by early 2027, aimed at AI chips such as stacked GPUs or logic on HBM (ZDNet Korea).
Sector Watch
Capital and AI customers
SoftBank — SoftBank swung to a ¥1.1 trillion ($7 billion) quarterly loss, its first in nearly two years, after a $3.7 billion writedown on advance payments for power equipment for US data center projects, including Pike County, Ohio, whose plans were later revised (Source: Reuters via CNA).
Equipment and EDA
Onto Innovation — The inspection and metrology toolmaker posted record third-quarter revenue of $409.7 million, up 88% on AI chip demand, and guided fourth-quarter revenue to $430 million to $450 million (Source: Onto Innovation).
Siemens — Siemens agreed to buy Lauterbach, which makes embedded-software debug and trace tools, to pair with its chip design and hardware-assisted verification tools. The price wasn’t disclosed and closing is expected in the first half of 2027 (Source: Siemens).
Substrates
Unimicron and Kinsus — Both Taiwanese substrate makers posted their seventh straight monthly revenue record in October on AI demand, with Unimicron up 68% from a year ago and Kinsus up 49% (Source: Taiwan News).
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Also worth a read:
Austin’s latest on Chipstrat, AMD Q3 FY26, Annotated
Vik’s latest on Vik’s Newsletter, Why AI Data Center Constraints Make Efficiency More Valuable